"While They Slept," by Kathryn Harrison

June 07, 2008|By Art Winslow

While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family

By Kathryn Harrison

Random House, 290, $25

During a two-year stretch of his adolescence, Billy Gilley was evaluated eight times, by psychologists, a psychiatrist, a social worker, a physician specializing in developmental disabilities and a team of educational specialists. His academic performance was substandard, and he had " 'poor social relations with peers.' " The first psychologist suggested family counseling that would include his parents, Linda and Bill, perhaps structured as a home intervention program -- recommendations that were not followed. Developmental tests turned up mood swings, violent behavior and learning disabilities; yet another evaluation pointed to impulsiveness and an inability "to anticipate the consequences of his behavior."

Just before he turned 15, Billy ran away from home and asked to be put in foster care; civil authorities placed him in a youth shelter for three weeks, after which he was remanded back to his parents; a children's services caseworker characterized him as "very troubled" and believed he was "suppressing much hurt and/or anger." In the early hours of April 27, 1984, at the family home in Medford, Ore., 18-year-old Billy, by then a school dropout, clubbed his parents to death with an aluminum baseball bat and fatally wounded his sister Becky, an 11-year-old fifth-grader, with blows to the head. She survived two days.

Upstairs in the house -- the murders took place on the first floor -- was the remaining family member, Billy's 16-year-old sister Jody, who was not assaulted and testified at Billy's trial that she heard Becky's screams and then clunking or pounding, twice, after which there were no screams, and then, after a pause, apparently farther away, another four or five thuds.

Kathryn Harrison's "While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family" is an exhumation of that night and a measured attempt to track whatever changes of perspective -- of persona, even -- the intervening quarter-century may have wrought in Billy and Jody. Partly a reconstruction of the night of the crime, within its compass is also a lay person's psychobiography of the siblings as Harrison searches out an explanation for the murders in family history and tries to parse differences between Jody's and Billy's accounts where they diverge.

Harrison also engages in interpretive speculation, particularly when it comes to thinly fictionalized stories written by Jody as an undergraduate and children's stories and drawings Billy has been creating while in prison, as well as what he calls his "memoirs" or "personal profile." (Convicted in fall 1984 on three counts of aggravated murder and sentenced to three consecutive life terms, Billy is an inmate of the Snake River Correctional Institution, where Harrison interviewed him.)

It might help to know -- before turning to some of the questions raised by the crime, by the troubled history that preceded it and by Harrison's methodology and conclusions -- that Bill Gilley, Billy's father, frequently punished the boy by secluding him in the family barn, tying him to a tractor wheel and whipping him with a rubber hose. That, according to Harrison, "Jody and Billy both describe parents who took sadistic pleasure in punishing their children, and whose viciousness was enabled by the fact that [their mother] gave instructions for Bill to carry out." That there are assertions and denials of sexual molestation, between siblings and between generations. That in an e-mail Jody sent Harrison in response to the author's questions about the destruction of the family, she observed, "When my mother sat on me and blew smoke in my face, she and Billy laughing at my discomfort, I no longer had any sense that they were my family at all." That at the time of the murders, Bill had been sleeping on the couch for months, exiled from the bedroom by Linda since he had, as Jody stated in an affidavit, " 'offered me all the money in his pocket if he could fool around with me.' " And that Billy and Jody had spoken more than once of killing their parents, including the day before the murder, "in what she understood to be a fantasy of revenge and what he believed was her sincere wish that he kill their abusive parents."